I have been thinking about the increased visibility of power as a concept for months, now. It’s the product of the steadfast focus on power in Black Lives Matter movement. Through this focus BLM achieves an exceptionally consistent sublimation of this broad theoretical concept into specific, everyday reality. I’m sure in the past people have done the same thing with “freedom.” Now we have the same regular concretization of the concept of “power.”

It’s addictive, thinking more and more about power, all the time. I know it’s not everyone’s thing, but as for me, I like it so much I traded years of my young, potentially-profitable life going to school for it.

Thinking about power is at the heart of political science. When we study politics, we study the social distribution of resources — that is, “who gets what, when and how.” The research we do aims to explain “who gets what”; who gets the majority of votes, the favorable trade deal, the tax break, or the prison sentence. This focus on “who gets what” can also be expressed as “who has the power to achieve what outcome.” Describing the nature of power, then, becomes very important to being able to understand the thing you’re studying. For people in academics studying legislative votes, you wrestle with Robert Dahl’s equations. For people in academics studying organizations, you think dig Max Weber’s description that power depends on defeating social resistance. (And for people in academics who use Google to discover there’s a whole encyclopedia devoted to different definitions of power, you suddenly realize the definition of power itself is the site of power-struggle and enjoy the moment of irony.)

Power is such a critical concept because it’s a word that stands in for an explanation of outcomes from competition–interpersonal, intergroup, or against an inanimate object or force. When two people or two groups have different preferences and one gets their way, we use the word “power” to describe that outcome. Conflict over resources–like money, status, or security–which leads to a distribution of those resources is the very essence of politics. Power is the measure of difference across the resources people obtain.

As a political movement, Black Lives Matter’s sustained focus on the concept of power has been an important aspect of their work. They’ve made it a regular part of public conversation across a range of incidents and events, creating new interpretive openings into things white America had previously not viewed as ambiguous. One example of this is in the activists’ repeated observation: “Watch whiteness work.” Activists apply this phrase in cases where we see a white person experiencing judicial or social lenience– a lenience, which we know from repeated examples, is unlikely to be extended to similarly-situated black people.

When an activist points to whiteness “working,” she invokes a person’s race silently pushing the bad judicial or social outcome away. The whiteness displaces the opposing force. Like gravity, or electricity, it is invisible power. It is the achievement of a non-action in a case where there would otherwise be an action. With its implicit reminder of the contrasting black experience, what “watch whiteness work” does is show us something that we can’t ordinarily see: the arrest not made, the threat not perceived.

When we don’t see this difference, we are not aware of the role of power in the interactions we have with each other, with law enforcement, with policymakers, with our current and potential employers, with our teachers, with our landlords, with our judges and juries.

Now that the election dust is settled — and while the policy dust is being kicked up — what can a closer analysis of the November results tell us about who wants what in Maine?

I’m going to use the election results, plus existing contextual data, to talk about the two big questions: 1) what drove voter turnout? and 2) who were Gov. LePage’s new supporters? Both of these questions remain highly relevant for legislators considering the governor’s policy plans.

A third question concerns the political impact of changes to municipal revenue sharing. The governor has been an avowed foe of municipal revenue sharing since arriving in office and, just as he did in 2012, he is currently advocating for the elimination of the program. As I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about municipal revenue sharing, I was curious to discover if the towns that faced the hardest consequences of that change – either in terms of reduction of direct revenue from the state or in terms of property tax increases – responded by voting against the governor.

By combining data from a variety of sources, we can see relationships between the political, economic, and demographic features of Maine municipalities.

The first thing to observe is the clear power of incumbency. Support for Gov. LePage improved across the board, with only 15 of the 457 municipalities I studied giving him a lower level of electoral support. Votes in 2010 strongly predicted votes in 2014.

Beyond this, however, there is some evidence that the prediction that municipalities with a larger proportion of older residents are not more supportive of Gov. LePage. In the 2014 elections, there was a weak negative relationship between votes for LePage and percentage of municipal residents over age 62.

This relationship is difficult to see because of the highly visible and significant political counterexamples of Portland and Orono, both with very low median ages (36 and 21!) relative to the rest of the state. However, characterizing older Mainers as being uniformly conservative looks to be fairly inaccurate; meanwhile, younger sections of western and southern Maine are far from uniformly liberal.

Wealth was another interesting variable to examine. Towns with a higher percentage of older residents also tend to have lower median household incomes, suggesting higher incomes and support for LePage might travel together. At the same time, Maine’s higher income areas tend to be in areas with higher levels of support for Democratic candidates.

Comparing the 2010 vote with the 2014 vote provides insight here. While, on average, the higher a community’s average median household income the lower its level of support for LePage in 2014, this was much less true than it was in 2010. Either because of the collapse of the Cutler candidacy–or because they had come to like him as a candidate–a number of residents of higher-income municipalities switched to supporting LePage in 2014. Wealthy towns moved further towards LePage in 2014.

At the same time that we see the emergence of a break between older and poorer and younger and wealthier Maine, the interesting and contradictory element suggested by the election results is that while older voters were not more likely to support LePage, they certainly were more likely to turn out for the election. For every additional year in median age of municipal residents, turnout increased .6%. This was literally visible in the numbers for our youngest and oldest municipalities: moving from the municipality with the youngest median age (Orono) to the oldest (Ogunquit), we see an increase in turnout from 38% to 68% of the towns’ registered voters. The higher voting levels among older voters is consistent with the “traditional voter” hypothesis, which states that older voters vote as a matter of routine and therefore are most likely to turn out for the more local, non-presidential elections.

As for the third question, I was surprised to find that neither the loss of municipal revenue sharing nor increases in property tax appeared to have electoral consequences at the municipal level. Despite the strong effort by actors like the Maine Municipal Association to link the governor’s reduction of municipal revenue sharing to harder times for municipalities, those efforts were not visible either in the relationship of lost municipal revenue to votes or increased local taxes to votes. It would be useful to know more about this dynamic, to find out how people in towns facing the greatest loss of state support felt about those changes– or if they are even aware of them. Certainly as advocates gear up for a fight over new tax proposals, they should be aware that current strategies appear to not have fully got traction with voters (at least as of last November.)

In case you were interested in looking at more potential relationships I am including the dataset I used to explore these relationships. If anything interesting stands out to you in the numbers below, please share it in the comments!

UPDATE: I cannot believe I forgot to look at the bears. With municipal level data it is much more possible to identify the effect of interest in Question 1, the bear-baiting measure, than it was with the county-level data. So what was the effect of the highly contentious ballot measure on turnout and support for LePage? Was it a game-changer?

It totally was. If 2010 vote for Gov. LePage predicts nearly two-thirds of the 2014 vote, and increased warmth towards LePage in wealthier towns added a bit more, adding in votes to support bear-baiting adds still ADDITIONAL predictive strength. Controlling for people in the town who voted for LePage in 2010 and the power of median municipal household income, every four votes against Question 1 predicted an increase of 1 vote in support of Gov. LePage.

Opposition to bear-baiting also drove turnout. While the age of municipal residents was the variable with the highest power for predicting 2014 turnout, and municipal median income was also important, percent opposing Question 1 (and supporting bear baiting) predicted an additional and substantial piece of turnout: 17% additional turnout, moving from the condition of highest support to the highest opposition to Q1. (An additional effect appeared to come from the lack of interest by independents. Municipalities with the highest proportion of “Unenrolled” voter registrants were much less likely to turn out to vote, controlling for the above-mentioned variables.)

Now, while it seems that attitudes about appropriate methods of killing bears may in fact have had a very substantial impact on the vote, it is not immediately easy to tell if it is actually responsible for the governor’s margin of victory. In order to figure it out, one would need to calculate the increased turnout for each municipality by first estimating an effect size for each municipality and then converting that into actual number of votes relative to each municipality’s population size. I think the spreadsheet contains all the information you would need to do that, so if anyone feels like taking it on that task, please feel very free to do so! (And let me know if you do, of course.)

The dust from the victory parties has settled. The governor has made some predictably gubernatorial statements. The election results have been fully experienced, if it will yet be some number of weeks before they actually show up on the Maine.gov election results site.

Luckily, we have the Bangor Daily News and Portland Press Herald unofficial election results. Putting these together with an official data record of the state’s voting, hunting, and demography, what can we learn about exactly why Tuesday’s vote turned out the way it did?

I’m interested in two outcomes: the vote for LePage which was not well predicted by polls, and Maine’s high voter turnout, relative to the rest of the country. (Because there’s nothing like seeing a national paper validate your prejudices about exactly which state is the Best State in America, I hereby forgive Reid Wilson for not citing my earlier post.) While there are lots of potential causes for both of these outcomes, I wanted to see what the evidence for them looked like.

Let’s take the governor first. I identified three most likely causes for the substantial increase in support he enjoyed this election: anti-presidential sentiment; the impact of Cutler/anti-Democratic Party “Third Party”-type preference; and, of course, bears. (Please indulge me in putting aside the argument from incumbency for the sake of this post – it’s obviously important, but it does not explain the details of variation in the governor’s support.)

Bears

The impact of Maine’s referendum on bear baiting was the most interesting potential reason discussed for increased support for LePage, theoretically achieved through the mechanism of increasing turnout in more Republican areas. There’s an endogeneity problem with exploring this, however, since how do we know that energized LePage voters aren’t simply more interested in supporting bear baiting?

Luckily, some of the old, wonderful Maine.gov DataShare site is still up and running. One of the more popular datasets on the site happens to be IFW Kills, a record of all of the registered hunting successes of the 2010-2012 period. This dataset lists all of the wild animals legally killed by date and location, giving us a very good picture of the geography of Maine hunting frequencies. I looked at the number of animals killed by county, and then divided each by population to get each county’s per-capita hunting frequency.

Even though not all of the successful hunting trips up in Piscataquis, Somerset and Aroostook counties are conducted by people living there, we can anticipate that this is a pretty good representation of locations where a larger proportion of people would identify as hunters. And, in fact, counties’ per capita reported hunting kills correlate pretty well with Tuesday’s vote on Ballot Question 1. If there’s at least one registered kill for every ten people in your county, then your county soundly rejected the measure.

However, was this relationship determinative for the governor’s victory? Let’s look at where Tuesday’s new votes came from.

Gov. LePage’s vote total on Tuesday, according to the BDN’s unofficial count, was about 32,000 higher than Rep. Michaud’s. Even though the governor gained votes in all of the counties, there just aren’t enough voters in the serious hunting counties to create that difference.

Adding up new votes for LePage in 2014 from the two southern counties of Cumberland and York alone, however, nearly gets you all the way there.

Third Parties

Although Maine’s most visibly liberal city is in Cumberland County, there are an increasing number of people in southern Maine (and in the former Democratic stronghold of Lewiston/Auburn, and in the area around the University of Maine, Orono) voting for a Republican governor.

This brings us to our second possibility: that Maine’s “Independent” voters category has some meaningfully different preferences from those of Maine Democrats, and some of Cutler’s southern supporters ultimately preferred a Governor LePage to a Governor Michaud. Despite the strong public narrative around Eliot Cutler’s appeal to Democrats, it’s important to consider the possibility that Cutler was also appealing to people looking for a socially liberal, but economically conservative, alternative to the Democratic party. Then, when Cutler was no longer viable, they voted for the candidate who would enact their economic preferences.

I compared two competing possibilities for explaining the governor’s improved vote share. If the governor were gaining more votes from people who share his social conservatism, we should expect to see even more votes from the socially conservative counties which opposed the 2012 citizens’ initiative to legalize same-sex marriage. Meanwhile, if the governor were gaining more votes from people who share his economic conservatism, we should expect to see more votes from places that, say, opposed the 2012 higher education bond issue.

2012 county level results on both of these measures do a pretty good job predicting the county level 2014 LePage vote, but rejection of the 2012 higher ed bond is a closer match. When we look at the same-sex marriage vote against LePage vote there are outliers, like Aroostook County which strongly opposed same sex marriage but supported Michaud at 43%, or Cumberland County which had fewer than 35% opposing same sex marriage but over 40% supporting LePage. For the economic question, there are no real outliers.

Looking at the past twenty years of gubernatorial elections in Maine, it becomes pretty clear that Maine has a persistent interest in candidates who occupy the socially liberal, economically conservative space. Totaling all third-party or Independent candidate votes together in each election, we have each of the Republican, Democratic, and 3rd Party/Independent categories averaging out to about a third of Maine’s gubernatorial electorate.

Obama

This brings me to my final theory. What was the impact of national sentiment towards the president?

(Don’t worry, there’s no chart for this one.)

Looking at county vote share for Obama in 2012, I did find a small negative relationship between county vote for Obama in 2012 and an increase in votes for LePage in 2014 – in other words, there might be some direct anti-Obama sentiment in the vote for LePage – but it seems more likely that if there was an effect it was indirect and not directly corresponding to the 2012 presidential vote.

Turnout

I’ve now covered the question of the increase in votes for LePage. I’m moving to my second question. What about our levels of turnout in general? Were there specific and identifiable causes increasing county movement to the polls?

Not that I could figure out.

People, this is still a mystery to me. I looked at bears, I looked at 2012 Obama support, I looked at social and economic conservatism, I looked at demographic change in counties between 2000 and 2010. Pretty much all of the counties increased their turnout between 2010 and 2014, with the exception of Knox and Oxford which decreased very slightly. Counties in both north and south were way up in terms of turnout. Central Maine was maybe a little less excited, but still turned out far above their 2010 levels. It was a good year for voting all around Maine.

And what’s interesting is that it has, since 1998, been a better year for voting every midterm election in Maine. Despite national midterm turnout being flat over the last decade or so (with a substantial dip lower in 2014), Maine has been regularly increasing its voting turnout every midterm election since 1998.

For most states this would mean that the electorate was growing along with the state’s population, but Maine’s population isn’t growing! According to the US Census, the state might even be shrinking a little.

So I leave it to you. What is it that explains Maine’s steady increase in midterm voting? And did I miss something obvious that connects it to the election results?

(Update: If you’re interested in seeing the data I used for this post, I’ve collected it in a single spreadsheet here. My sources are linked in the second tab.)

When you’re from Maine, it’s hard to watch people pooh-pooh this year’s turn-out. Mainers turned out in extremely high numbers for a non-presidential year, topping this year’s election turnout contest. Why did they come out in those numbers, despite having just been through a ridiculously unseasonal snowstorm with inch-accumulation in the double-digits?

Why WOULDN’T you come out, would be the Mainer’s answer, given the closeness of most of the state’s major races? Not only did the state have a gubernatorial election that multiple sources touted as the tightest election in the nation, but there was an extremely tight race for Maine’s second Congressional district — a representative who constitutes half of Maine’s delegation to the US House — and then there was this unfortunately timed, recurring, yet extremely hotly contested ballot measure about bear hunting. (Personally, I am now considering this to be the election where the bears finally figured out how to get back at us.)

Competitiveness is a classic reason why people get excited about turning out for elections. When people know that their vote could be decisive, they have a greater interest in participating. This is a big reason why political scientists think gerrymandering depresses voter turnout.

So I knew personally about Maine. But how well does competitiveness predict the scale of other states’ turnout figures?

To find out, I used the last week of polls posted at Real Clear Politics. Since we’re talking about state-level turnout, most individual US House seat races wouldn’t be effective to count, but I did include all polls for state races covering at least half of the state. This added up to 66 races for governor, US senator, or US representative for states with two or fewer US House reps like Maine and New Hampshire. It did not include bear baiting or any other exciting state-level ballot initiative, because RCP didn’t include those polls.

I sorted all polls taken in the last week of these 66 races and, where there was more than one poll, chose the poll with the narrowest projected victory. I then scored all of these polls on a 0-5 scale according to their competitiveness: I gave a score of “5” to projected ties, “4” to races where the front runner was a single point ahead, and so on down to “0” for a projected vote spread of 6 points or more. This is what that looked like (click to sort.)

Because several states (like Maine) had multiple competitive races, I totaled their competitiveness scores together into a composite competitiveness index. This helped reveal that while states could have a few big statewide contests, it was possible that none of them was competitive. This was the case in South Dakota, for example, where the closest of the three statewide races was projected to be won by 11 points. Other states, meanwhile, had multiple competitive statewide races.

Here’s what the ranking of states according to the competitiveness index looks like:

Based on a highly scientific eyeball test, this set of scores bears a passing resemblance to the initial state turnout rates collected by Michael McDonald and visualized at FiveThirtyEight. States with competitive elections were more likely to turn out in higher rates.

The correlation is certainly not perfect but it looks to explain a good chunk of the variation.

Georgia’s outlier status therefore doesn’t disprove the voter interest theory behind increased turnout. Instead, it suggests that voting is a two-way street. Even if you’re interested in turning out to vote, your state also has to be interested in permitting you to do so.

Two lovely coastal towns in Maine. What could they possibly have to fight over?

I personally would not have picked them to represent poles in our current gubernatorial election campaign, but some evidence suggests otherwise.

What evidence? Evidence available in information available as of last night, when the gubernatorial candidates’ 11-day pre-election filings were made available online at the Maine Ethics Commission Public Disclosure site. (When I first started looking at them this morning, they were just in PDF form. By afternoon, they were all integrated and available as downloadable structured data – including even the new filings from today. Let’s have a round of applause for the efficient and hard-working folks at the Maine Ethics Commission!)

Last week, in an attempt to observe any signs of a 2010-style surge in Eliot Cutler’s support, I observed trends using information about the past several months of donations to the gubernatorial campaigns. The trends that I observed — that Mike Michaud had deeper reservoirs of committed Maine supporters as revealed through numbers of campaign contributions, and that they existed across a broader swath of the state — continue to be true for donations to the candidates made between September 17 and October 21.

There was a massive increase in the number of donations coming in during this final major filing. Paul LePage nearly tripled his donations from Mainers, collecting 1088 individual donations. Mike Michaud more than doubled his previous monthly record of 901, collecting 1916 donations in the 9/17-10/21 period. Eliot Cutler did see a small pre-election increase in donations, but not enough to match July, the month in which he collected the largest number of Maine-based donations.

These data confirm my observations from last week. If Cutler is going to see any surge, it certainly isn’t showing itself in people trying to donate to his campaign in October. Meanwhile, Michaud and LePage are both witnessing a significant increase in the number of Mainers willing to take out out their checkbooks in order to make sure their candidate’s the one to occupy the Blaine House in 2015.

With the larger number of records, it’s also easier to observe concentrations of support for the candidates.

In my last post, I observed that Michaud was doing better along the midcoast than Cutler. The numbers that lay behind those maps that I made looked like this: zip codes, and then the quantities of individual donations from each zip code.

If you click on that table, it will bring you to a Google Fusion Table that lets you sort the columns by clicking on them. (Not sure why I can’t embed it in WordPress post but I can’t – if anyone wants to let me know how to fix that, I’d be grateful.)

The September numbers revealed the most general fundraising success for Michaud lying in the Portland area, but the largest number of Michaud donors from a single zip code came from Brunswick — 44 Michaud donations in September from 04011. Despite beating Mitchell by 10 points there in 2010, Cutler received just 7 donations with a Brunswick zip code. LePage received 6.

Cutler’s base of Maine donations in September, meanwhile, came most from Cape Elizabeth (33 from 04107), Yarmouth (29 from 04096), and Falmouth (25 from 04105). In all three of those towns, he outpaced donations to Michaud during early September. Although he also got many September donations from Portland’s West End and Deering neighborhoods (30 from 04102), Michaud got 47 September donations from 04102.

How did these dynamics change over the past month?

(Again, click on the numbers to go to a live Fusion Table where you can sort it by clicking on the column headers.)

Looking at the new month’s records, we can observe very serious competition for the affections of Cape Elizabeth. In this final large pre-election filing, LePage received the most attention from 04107 donors, with 40 donations. Michaud tripled his number of donations from 04107, receiving 38. Cutler received 34 donations from 04107, which, although it was his largest single number of donors from any one zip code, put him behind the other two candidates with regard to October’s Cape Elizabeth donations.

As opposed to the split opinions in Cape Elizabeth, Brunswick residents provided over 100 donations to Michaud’s campaign. This represented five times the 21 Brunswick residents giving to the surging LePage campaign, and twenty times the 5 Brunswick residents giving to Cutler. Michaud’s lead in donations from Portland residents (04101, 04012, 04103) and and the northern Portland suburbs also dramatically increased. Michaud received more donations from Yarmouth than either of the other two candidates in October. Michaud and LePage tied for donations from Falmouth with 35 each, while Cutler received 28.

Also of interest: in October, many more donations came from the town of Scarborough. Although Cutler carried Scarborough handily in 2010, Michaud raised significantly more 04074 zip code October donations (52) than either LePage (27) or Cutler (12).

Now, a last question. Does any of this matter at all? The demographic profile of campaign donors, especially with an incumbent in the race, is certainly quite different from voters at large. For example, I expect LePage’s election-day support to be many, many times larger than what we’re seeing in campaign donations, though the massive jump in number of donations during this last filing helps fill in some of the places where we would expect him to do especially well. (For example, in addition to the large increase in wealthy parts of southern Maine, we see lots of donations to LePage from Skowhegan in this filing.)

We can’t, unfortunately, seek to compare the relationship of campaign donations to votes in the last Maine gubernatorial election. In 2010, Libby Mitchell ran as a Maine Clean Elections candidate, which meant that she raised donations in only a very cursory initial way. Furthermore, thanks to the US Supreme Court rulings that took important limits off of campaign finance, the role of campaign donations has skyrocketed in terms of its frequency, amount, and importance in the last several years’ political campaigns. Maine’s 2010 gubernatorial election simply doesn’t offer a good comparison for understanding how campaign donations relate to votes.

I did try to think of a recent case where I would have access to both detailed campaign finance information and detailed vote information. I knew that the New York City Campaign Finance Board provides very detailed records that allow you to sort donations by date and location. New York City also had a very recent important election: their 2013 mayoral race to replace Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Since the Democrats were strongly favored to win this election, the interesting test lay not in the general election but in the city’s 2013 Democratic mayoral primary.

I looked at donations going from residents of the city’s five boroughs to the four most popular candidates running in the Democratic mayoral primary: Christine Quinn, John Liu, Bill Thompson and Bill de Blasio. I looked specifically at July and August, the last two months before the September primary.

I totaled the number of donations each candidate received for those two months, and then determined what proportion they had received of the total donations to all four candidates. Finally, I looked at the number of votes each of these four candidates received in the September primary, and determined what proportion each had received of the total votes to the four candidates. (I couldn’t use their proportion of votes received overall, because there were nine candidates running and a number of candidates were written in on submitted ballots.)

Here’s what I found:

And rendered visually,

In other words, there was a great deal of correlation between New Yorkers’ donations and July and August and who they ended up voting for.

This is hardly rigorous proof of the validity of using local campaign donations to predict elections. This technique is highly speculative and still exploratory, and I think it might anyways be best suited to open races where nobody starts with the advantage of incumbency.

However, the New York correlation does show, I think, that local campaign donations in the post-Citizens United age can play a new role in understanding the flux and scope of local preference. In the Maine case, for example, I think you’d have to show that Cutler’s supporters are less likely than Michaud or LePage supporters are to donate to their candidate in order to say that there’s no predictive value here.

We’ll certainly soon have an opportunity to know much more, in very specific detail, about the relationship between local campaign donations and voting behavior in Maine.

That, of course, is not by a long shot the most important outcome of this election. However, as a present resident of the District of Columbia, it’s the only outcome that’s left for me to reap directly. I know it’s not for many of you. Nonetheless, at least by providing this information, I feel like I have done some civic due diligence and offered what insights I can.

In 2010, at just about this time I was conducting a poll of Maine’s gubernatorial race at Thomas College with the help of about 40 political science students. We all learned a lot. What many of the students learned was that they never wanted to have a career that involved cold-calling people at home. What I learned, meanwhile, was a little bit more exciting and immediately consequential.

I learned that Eliot Cutler had pulled even with Paul LePage.

We were among the last of the polls in the field that year and maybe it was my students’ persuasiveness, or maybe it was just luck of the draw, but our results ended up spotting the Cutler surge more effectively than any other poll.

Though my media skills were yet insufficiently developed to get this out into the local news, I immediately called my Democratic friends and family and told them to vote for Cutler. If they wanted to support an alternative to Paul LePage, I told them that the mass of non-LePage supporting voters had turned away from Mitchell and that they should switch their vote as well.

I was serving as an informal coordinating mechanism. And in this case, I was right. Cutler achieved an unprecedented 10 point increase between late October and November 2.

Why did I do that?

I felt the need to help like-minded voters coordinate. We desperately need coordinating mechanisms in a state like Maine, where races frequently see more than two strong candidates. Without an election method like ranked choice voting which lets voters choose their true preference without a negative consequence, our current system punishes sincere voters who vote for the third-ranked candidate by effectively removing their votes from the top-two candidate they would otherwise support. In other words, voting your top choice may help get your last choice elected.

Because of this unpleasant reality, voters mostly understand that they need to vote strategically. But how do you vote strategically if you don’t know which two candidates have the most support? Without that information, voters are unable to tell whether their true preference is in the top two, or if they should instead vote for the least-bad alternative.

After Cutler’s unprecedented surge at the end of the 2010 race, we have an especially strong need for this information since we know that the answer isn’t always obvious.

The question Maine’s Democrats and left-leaning voters need answered this week is: are we seeing a surge for Cutler similar to what we saw in 2010?

Without ranked choice voting, we must come up with imperfect ways to compare the candidates’ likely support before election day. This is why polling Maine’s gubernatorial race is so vitally important. Since I am not in Waterville this week to conduct this personal civic duty, I tried to come up with an alternative mechanism.

We can take a look at how people are voting with their wallets.

The huge increase in the amount and significance of campaign donations in Maine’s elections since 2010 is generally very depressing, but in this case it might come in handy as an indication of how much committed support the candidates have across the state. While the profile of Maine campaign donors is not a great match for Maine voters more generally, it’s a reasonable way to think about the range and depth of commitment across at least a meaningful and politically active segment of Maine’s electorate.

In particular, it is useful as a gauge when we look not at how much money the candidates are raising, but how many Mainers are contributing. For this kind of use of campaign data it doesn’t really matter how much an individual can give, because it’s just a proxy for committed candidate preference. People might be able to give more or fewer dollars, but they can only vote once.

Finally, while we can use the Maine Ethics Commission data to look just at Maine donors, we can only know about those who gave more than $50, since the totals for those giving less than $50 don’t come with address information. These small donors probably include a large number of Mainers, but without address information we can’t be sure. (The totals of donations under $50 made to the candidates in 2014 were: LePage $12,060; Cutler $20,369, and Michaud $76,971.)

So how many Mainers gave more than $50 in the last few months to the gubernatorial candidates?

The numbers vary substantially, but for the last four months Michaud has generally received twice the number of donations made by the other two candidates.

This is not immediately obvious from looking at campaign donation totals. The average Michaud donation is substantially smaller than the average Cutler donation or average LePage donation.

This may lead to campaign contribution amount totals being a misleading measure of local support, since it suggests a lower number of contributors.

I also looked just at where donors were coming from in September and mapped the number of September donors in each zip code using Google Fusion Tables. This gives a sense of where support for each candidate is strongest, here close to the end of the race. (You can click on the maps to enlarge them.)

Number of Cutler donors, September 2014

Number of Michaud donors, September 2014

Number of LePage donors, September 2014

New donations will be filed with the Ethics Commission on 10/24, and I’m looking forward to taking one last look later this week at how support changed during October.

So what do campaign contributions tell us about how the wind’s blowing in Maine this year?

They tell us that Michaud has witnessed the highest number of Maine donors in the last four months. They tell us that both Michaud and LePage have a stronger base of support across the state than Cutler, and that Michaud has the highest density of southern Maine support across the three candidates. This is a telling difference from 2010, when Cumberland and Sagadahoc Counties provided Cutler with a critical base of support. All up the coast, in fact, where Mitchell did more poorly than average in 2010, Michaud appears to have support.

So what’s causing this difference?

2010 and 2014 began in very different ways. The 2010 gubernatorial primaries on both sides were fiercely contested, with astonishing levels of rancor and spending. The fact that three independent candidates joined the partisan candidates in vigorous campaigns throughout the race revealed the breadth of disagreement over the state’s political future.

This time, meanwhile, the field settled quickly, with two partisan candidates who already enjoyed strong statewide support. The Republican party quickly confirmed Governor Paul LePage as the 2014 nominee, despite some early chatter about primaries. (Even with the governor’s challenges, as national odds are strongly in his favor: since 1980, almost 80% of incumbent governors win re-election.) Maine Democrats, meanwhile, made up for their party’s divisive 2010 primary by selecting Congressman Mike Michaud, a nominee whose six successive elections to represent Maine’s second Congressional district demonstrated his electoral strength in the part of the state traditionally less friendly to Democrats.

Because of the strength and broad name-recognition of this slate of candidates, recent polls are showing that only between 3 and 5% of voters are currently undecided, and that suggests — contrary to 2010 — that if a large shift happens at the end of the race it will require a large number of people to vote away from their current preference.

It’s not a poll, but I don’t see a large shift in the direction of candidate support happening this year.

Me being me, my very favorite way to engage in this pastime is by exploring all of the websites and web gadgets that real estate companies have built up in the past few years using local data. Zillow and Trulia are the most developed examples of this I’ve seen, and what makes them so addictive is the illusion offer that you can specify exactly what kind of life you’d like to be able to lead in your new house.

My slice of demographic loooooves schools. Zillow’s property finding tool excels at allowing you to specify schools that you’d prefer — on one very specific dimension. Through an integration with the Great Schools rating website, Zillow surfaces the ranking of local schools on standardized tests. Although I know only too well that these rankings are essentially simply reports on the local economic environment of these schools, my lizard brain nonetheless enjoys looking for 9s and 10s and exploring the local housing stock.

But perhaps you are not interested solely in schools. Would you like to specify the number of reported crimes you’d be willing to tolerate in your neighborhood? How about your commute distance, by car, public transport or bike? Trulia lets you filter for properties meeting a standard you choose for both of those variables. It definitely tries to maximize the number of qualities you could choose for, offering to find you zones of lower earthquake and fire risk, proximity to (or distance from) restaurants and nightclubs, and median neighborhood property price. (It also has a school filter, but it doesn’t work as well as Zillow’s for some reason.)

But for all of these choices, none of the real estate tools I’ve seen let me search for a feature that I really want in a neighborhood: racial diversity.

This is a huge potential selling point for housing in the DC area, and yet the real estate websites have yet to make this search option available.

Taken all together, the DC metro area is incredibly racially diverse – substantially more racially diverse than the US as a whole, in fact. Unfortunately, like many metropolitan areas, that aggregate diversity hides an on-the-ground reality of neighborhoods which are largely segregated by race. As events in Ferguson, Mo. tragically underscore, the interplay of race, mutual social isolation, and power is still a core American issue, and continued de facto racial housing segregation helps to contribute this dynamic. While no longer an explicit policy, decades of racially discriminatory housing law are effectively continued through the racialization of class and the dramatic difference in income for different kinds of city-based work.

You can see this de facto segregation in visualizations of DC’s racial demographics, such as CUNY’s Center for Urban Research maps using 2000 and 2010 data from the U.S. Census. A line runs roughly through the center of Washington DC, with most whites living on one side and most blacks living on the other.

That said, the DC metro area is getting better, at least as concerns black-white residential segregation. While the average white or black DC metro resident in 1980 lived in a neighborhood that was 70% made up of members identifying with their race, in 2010 that figure was down below 60%. (Meanwhile, though the DC area’s Hispanic/Latino population increased over the last 10 years, people identifying in this category became more likely to live in more racially isolated neighborhoods.)

So what does this mean for casual real estate window-shoppers like myself? Well, some of us would like to be able to choose to filter not just for good schools and low crime, but also for diversity: for the neighborhoods and suburbs where our neighbors would reflect the true full range of people — and cultures, historical backgrounds, and experiences — that make up this place.

Trulia looks like it might have been exploring this option a bit a couple of years ago. In 2012, the company partnered with Forbes to look at “America’s Most Diverse Neighborhoods and Metros,” where the list of top-ranking neighborhoods linked to Trulia real estate listings. The next step will be linking that data with the rest of their data, so that potential customers can find the combination of factors that allows them to best maximize across preferences, including distance to work, transport options and school availability.

Once a “shopping for diversity” option exists, it will also need to include a consideration of whether a neighborhood’s diversity is supported through policy or local tradition and therefore seems likely to persist, or whether its just a temporary artifact of a neighborhood moving quickly from ownership dominated by one race to another (like through gentrification created by rapid new property development.) This isn’t to say that there’s only one way to arrive at a diverse neighborhood, but if you’re looking to support the existence of racially diverse communities then the duration of diversity in a place over a period of time might signal that it’s a pretty stable quality of the location.

Anyway, even WITHOUT a dedicated tool (ahem!) I am able to use the excellent mapping tools that do exist elsewhere in order to casually explore the area. Using UrbanResearchMaps.org, I can look around and notice Germantown:

Anyway, I am using this opportunity to speak directly to the real estate brokerage community out there. I know you’re keeping an eye on me, since several of you out there seem to have purchased my email address. (And seriously, Asif Qadir, do I look like someone who’s a good target for million dollar listings? Your automailer needs a few tweaks.) We should have a way to build a preference for diversity into our everyday choices, including housing.